A local tree alignment approach to relation extraction of multiple arguments

In this paper, we address the problem of relation extraction of multiple arguments where the relation of entities is framed by multiple attributes. Such complex relations are successfully extracted using a syntactic tree-based pattern matching method. While induced subtree patterns are typically used to model the relations of multiple entities, we argue that hard pattern matching between a pattern database and instance trees cannot allow us to examine similar tree structures. Thus, we explore a tree alignment-based soft pattern matching approach to improve the coverage of induced patterns. Our pattern learning algorithm iteratively searches the most influential dependency tree patterns as well as a control parameter for each pattern. The resulting method outperforms two baselines, a pairwise approach with the tree-kernel support vector machine and a hard pattern matching method, on two standard datasets for a complex relation extraction task. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.